̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - socioeconomic differences

Feeling poorer than your friends in early adolescence is associated with worse mental health

fpjl2 — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 09:08:25 +0000

Young people who believe they come from poorer backgrounds than their friends are more likely to have lower self-esteem and be victims of bullying than those who feel financially equal to the rest of their peer group, according to a new study from psychologists at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

̽��ֱ��team also found that those who think themselves poorer and those who believe they are richer were both more likely to perpetrate bullying. Overall, feeling a sense of economic equality among your friends had the best outcomes for mental health and social behaviour.

While economic disadvantage on a society-wide spectrum has long been linked to mental health and social problems in young people, the new study is one of the first to show that just feeling poorer compared to those in your immediate social sphere may be related to negative psychological outcomes.

According to researchers, judgments we make about ourselves via “social comparison” in early adolescence – how popular or attractive we think we are, compared to others – are central to our burgeoning sense of self, and perceived economic status may contribute to this development.

“Adolescence is an age of transitions, when we use social comparisons to make self-judgments and develop our sense of self,” said study lead author Blanca Piera Pi-Sunyer, a Cambridge Gates Scholar and PhD candidate in the ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Psychology.

“A sense of our economic position not just in wider society, but in our immediate environment, might be problematic for our sense of belonging,” said Piera Pi-Sunyer. “Belonging is particularly important for well-being and psychosocial functioning during adolescence.”

“Our research suggests that wealth comparisons with those around us might contribute to a sense of social and personal self-worth when we are young.”

̽��ֱ��latest study, published today in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, was co-led by Piera Pi-Sunyer and Dr Jack Andrews of the ̽��ֱ�� of New South Wales, as part of a research project conducted by Cambridge psychologist Prof Sarah-Jayne Blakemore.

̽��ֱ��researchers analysed perceived economic inequality within friendship groups among 12,995 children in the UK at age 11.

Eleven-year-olds who believed themselves poorer than their friends scored 6-8% lower for self-esteem, and 11% lower in terms of wellbeing, than those who saw themselves as economically equal to friends.

Those who considered themselves less wealthy were also more likely to have 'internalising difficulties' such as anxiety, as well as behavioural problems eg anger issues or hyperactivity.

Adolescents who see themselves as poorer than their friends were 17% more likely to report being bullied or picked on compared to those who feel financially the same as friends at age 11.

While reported levels of victimisation fell across the board by the time young people reached 14 years old, those who considered themselves poorer were still 8% more likely to be victimised than those who felt economically similar to friends.

Feeling both richer or poorer than peers was related to 3-5% higher rates of actually perpetrating bullying. “It may be that feeling different in any way at a time when belonging is important increases the risk of interpersonal difficulties such as bullying,” said Piera Pi-Sunyer.

Part of Piera Pi-Sunyer’s PhD research looks at the cognitive processes behind how we view ourselves. This includes how memorising and internalising self-judgements in our earlier years can guide how we come to think of ourselves – sometimes known as 'self-schema'.

“Negative judgments about ourselves can bias us to pay attention to information that reinforces a lack of self-worth, which has implications for mental health. We see this may well include economic perceptions among some of our peer and friendship groups during adolescence,” said Piera Pi-Sunyer.

̽��ֱ��researchers used data collected as part of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), conducted with thousands of young people born between the years 2000 and 2002. ̽��ֱ��surveys gauged an array of mental states and social behaviours, and included questions on perceived economic status.

̽��ֱ��majority of children felt they were as wealthy as their friends, but 4% and 8% perceived themselves as poorer or richer, respectively, than their friends (16% said they didn’t know).

̽��ֱ��MCS also gathered data on 'objective family income', including a measure of weekly family disposable income, allowing researchers to discount the effects of actual parental wealth.

“Many studies suggest that, objectively, young people from disadvantaged backgrounds have more mental health difficulties. Our findings show that the subjective experience of disadvantage is also relevant,” added Piera Pi-Sunyer.

“You do not have to be rich or poor to feel richer or poorer than your friends, and we can see this affects the mental health of young adolescents.”

How rich or poor young people think they are compared to their friendship group is linked to wellbeing and even bullying during the shift between childhood and teenage years.

Belonging is particularly important for well-being and psychosocial functioning during adolescence

Blanca Piera Pi-Sunyer

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School children in Great Yarmouth sitting in the cloakroom

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Public health experts urge government to put health at centre of levelling up agenda

cjb250 — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 00:01:22 +0000

Based on decades of research around tackling health inequalities at local and regional level, the guidance is aimed at central and local government as well as other agencies with a stake in improving health.

̽��ֱ��team has published its report on the Cambridge Research Methods Hub website. It sets out five principles and eight policy recommendations that are designed to be used together long-term across national, regional and local systems.

̽��ֱ��principles are:

Allocating resources proportionate to need;
Working in partnership with local communities;
Developing long-term, multisector and cross-government programmes;
Offering bespoke services to disadvantaged groups;
Ensuring initiatives are healthy-by-default and easy to use.

Each principle is supported by case studies, such as Healthy New Towns, the Big Local initiative, and New Deal for Communities.

Dr John Ford, lead author and Clinical Lecturer in Public Health at the Primary Care Unit, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “ ̽��ֱ��new guidance has been produced to show how to level up health. We already know that progress on closing the gap is possible. ̽��ֱ��previous cross-government health inequalities programme reduced the socio-economic gap in life expectancy by six months and improved overall life expectancy. This was achieved through sustained, multi-component, and cross-government action over more than 10 years.”

Policy recommendations include: health being a core part of levelling up; development of a cross-government health inequalities strategy; establishing a consensus around what levelling up health means; and a focus on the social and structural factors that determine health.

Importantly, the report recommends a move away from initiatives that require individuals to invest time and effort to benefit from, such as promoting gym membership, because they tend to increase inequalities. Rather, the researchers recommend initiatives that make healthy choices the default and require minimal effort from the individuals, such as fluoridation of water and opportunistic screening for health problems during vaccine appointments.

Furthermore, the report calls for an end to competitive bidding of local areas to allocate public funds. Instead, it recommends allocating funding based on population need.

Health inequalities in England mean that men and women in deprived areas live an average of ten and eight years less respectively than men and women in more affluent places. Area-level health inequalities like these are driven by the conditions in which we live. Education and employment opportunities, housing, opportunities for exercise and a good diet are just some of the factors that directly affect our health.

Left-behind neighbourhoods, which have not prospered as much as other areas, experience greater health inequalities and the health of disadvantaged areas in the Northern regions has been falling further behind. For example, a baby boy born today in Blackpool can expect an additional 17 years of poor health compared to a baby boy born in Richmond upon Thames.

̽��ֱ��pandemic has exacerbated inequalities, and deaths related to COVID-19 in the most deprived areas of the country are double those in the least deprived. ̽��ֱ��long-term repercussions of the pandemic for some people – food and housing insecurity, debt and poverty – are expected to disproportionally affect those living in areas of higher deprivation, causing further damage to wellbeing and health.

̽��ֱ��researchers say that work to address area-level health inequalities is critically important for the UK Government’s levelling up agenda.

̽��ֱ��team reviewed data from over 650 research studies and 19 published reports. ̽��ֱ��12 case studies were selected from 143 potentially relevant examples from across England showing what works.

Professor Clare Bambra, Professor of Public Health at the ̽��ֱ�� of Newcastle, said: “Levelling up needs to urgently focus on health inequalities by addressing the unequal conditions in which we live, work and age.

“For too long, a lack of investment in key services has meant that more deprived, ‘Left Behind Areas’ – particularly in the north – have suffered disproportionately. ̽��ֱ��COVID-19 pandemic has worsened these inequalities and it will cast a long shadow across our future heath and economic prosperity as a country unless we act now. That’s why levelling up health is so central to the government’s overall approach to levelling up the country.”

̽��ֱ��new guidance was commissioned by Public Health England.

Reference
John Ford, Vic McGowan, Fiona Davey, Jack Birch, Isla Kuhn, Anwesha Lahiri, Anna Gkiouleka, Ananya Arora, Sarah Sowden, Clare Bambra. Levelling Up Health: A practical, evidence-based framework. December 2021

Health needs to be at the heart of the Government’s levelling up agenda, say researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Newcastle. ̽��ֱ��team have today published practical guidance on how to reduce health inequalities.

̽��ֱ��new guidance has been produced to show how to level up health. We already know that progress on closing the gap is possible

John Ford

Francis Heathcote

Blackpool

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Autism rates have increased and show differences in ethnic minorities and links to social disadvantage

cjb250 — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 15:00:20 +0000

Black and Chinese pupils were 26% and 38% more likely to be autistic respectively and autistic children were much more likely to face significant social disadvantage. ̽��ֱ��results are published today in JAMA Pediatrics.

̽��ֱ��team drew on data from the School Census from the National Pupil Database, collected by the Department for Education from individuals aged 2-21 years old in state-funded schools in England. Of more than seven million pupils studied, 119,821 pupils had a diagnosis of autism in their record in the English state educational system, of whom 21,660 also had learning difficulties (18.1%). Boys showed a prevalence of autism of 2.8% and girls showed a prevalence of 0.65%, with a boy-to-girl ratio of 4.3:1.

Prevalence was highest in pupils of black ethnicity (2.1%) and lowest in Roma/Irish Travellers (0.85%), with these estimates being the first to be published for these populations. Pupils with a record of autism in schools were 60% more likely to also be socially disadvantaged, and 36% less likely to speak English. ̽��ֱ��findings reveal significant differences in autism prevalence, as recorded in formal school systems, across ethnic groups and geographical location.

̽��ֱ��lead researcher of the study, Dr Andres Roman-Urrestarazu from the Autism Research Centre (ARC) and Cambridge Public Health at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “We can now see that autism is much more common than previously thought. We also found significant variations in autism diagnosis in different ethnic minorities, though the reason why this should be the case isn’t clear and warrants further research.”

Previous estimates of the prevalence of autism in the UK by the same research group in Cambridge, and based on a school-based survey, suggested that one in 64 children (1.57%) were autistic. ̽��ֱ��new study, based on school records that usually underestimate the actual proportion of children who meet diagnostic criteria, shows a considerable increase in the autism prevalence in England. ̽��ֱ��researchers say the increase is likely to be because autism has become better recognised by both parents and schools in recent years.

Professor Carol Brayne, Co-chair of Cambridge Public Health and Professor of Public Health Medicine, said: “This study shows how we can draw on large datasets in a way that is rigorous and valuable for our understanding of autism.”

Professor Fiona Matthews from Newcastle ̽��ֱ�� added: “This study highlights the need for more attention to the unrecognised and differing needs of autistic children from disadvantaged and diverse backgrounds.”

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the ARC, said: “We can now see a snapshot of how many autistic children there are, and can drill down into local and ethnic variation, and reveal links with vulnerability. It is important that we safeguard the rights of children to access diagnostic services and education, tailored to their needs.”

This research was made possible by a generous donation for a Global Public Health Leadership programme by Dennis and Mireille Gillings Fellowship awarded to Dr Andres Roman-Urrestarazu. This study was also supported by the Autism Research Trust, the Wellcome Trust, the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking (JU), the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre and the NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care East of England at Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust.

Reference
Roman-Urrestarazu, R et al. Association of Race/Ethnicity and Social Disadvantage With Autism Prevalence in 7 Million School Children in England. JAMA Pediatrics; 29 March 2021; DOI: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2021.0054

Around one in 57 (1.76%) children in the UK is on the autistic spectrum, significantly higher than previously reported, according to a study of more than seven million children carried out by researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Psychiatry, in collaboration with researchers from Newcastle ̽��ֱ�� and Maastricht ̽��ֱ��.

It is important that we safeguard the rights of children to access diagnostic services and education, tailored to their needs

Simon Baron-Cohen

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Socio-economic status predicts UK boys’ development of essential thinking skills

Anonymous — Tue, 21 Jul 2020 10:57:05 +0000

̽��ֱ��findings emerged from an ongoing project which is exploring contrasts in the development of these skills in Eastern and Western societies and their relationship to academic achievement. Executive functions are cognitive skills that help us to meet goals – such as our ability to ignore distractions or switch between tasks – and they significantly affect children’s performance at school.

Across two linked studies, researchers found that the socio-economic background of British boys is directly connected to these skills. Those from wealthier families typically performed better in tests of their executive functions, while those from less-affluent backgrounds did worse.

̽��ֱ��connection was far less direct for British girls, however – and absent altogether among boys or girls from mainland China and Hong Kong, who, despite being generally less affluent than their British peers, consistently outperformed them in the tests.

These results imply that specific cultural factors in children’s lives that shape the acquisition of executive functions, also influence socio-economic gaps in academic outcomes. It is not clear what these cultural ‘drivers’ are, but they may include differences in curriculum, parenting, or attitudes to education.

̽��ֱ��research was by a team of academics from the Faculty of Education and the Centre for Family Research, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Dr Michelle Ellefson, Reader in Cognitive Science at the Faculty of Education, said: “Based on other research, we might have anticipated a direct link between socio-economic status and executive functions; in fact, this existed only for British boys. Pretty much any test pupils do at school requires executive functions, so if we want to reduce the achievement gap between children from different backgrounds, it’s important that we understand the mechanisms behind that relationship.”

Claire Hughes, Professor of Developmental Psychology in the Centre for Family Research, said: “There is concern in the UK that among children from less-advantaged backgrounds, boys in particular often under-perform academically, and the possibility has been raised in some research that features of their home environment play a role in this. What is interesting here is that we saw no relationship between socio-economic status and executive functions for boys in Hong Kong and China. We need to investigate why that might be the case.”

̽��ֱ��research was part of the Family Thinking Skills project, which is exploring links between executive functions, school attainment and cultural differences in Britain and Hong Kong by comparing data from children and parents in both countries. Executive functions are mediated by the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which develops into our mid-20s, and this means that they are likely to be shaped in part by cultural influences like upbringing and environment.

̽��ֱ��latest pair of studies looked at whether socio-economic status, which is known to influence children’s performance at school, does so because it impacts on their executive functions, or has an effect independent of cognitive skills. They also investigated how consistent the relationship is across genders. “Very little research has looked at this in Asia, and big differences with the UK might point to cultural differences driving attainment,” Ellefson said.

Initially, the researchers used data from 835 children aged 9 to 16 living in Hong Kong and the UK. ̽��ֱ��participants completed computer-based thinking games to test their executive functions, and various mathematical tests to assess numeracy. Data about socio-economic status was also provided by their parents and through a survey.

Because children in Hong Kong are highly adept with computers from an extremely young age, which might distort the results in the thinking skills tests, a second study was undertaken with 453 children in Shandong, China, led by PhD researcher Chengyi Xu. This deliberately targeted children whose use computers much less.

Overall, British students performed significantly worse in the numeracy tests, and their executive functions were about two years behind the level of their Chinese peers, even though British children tended to be from wealthier backgrounds. Within countries, there was little difference between girls’ and boys’ average test scores, although girls displayed slightly higher cognitive flexibility.

̽��ֱ��children’s levels of executive function and socio-economic status were both shown to affect their numeracy scores, but in most cases they did so independently of each other. ̽��ֱ��exception was British boys, for whom socio-economic status directly predicts executive functions, which in turn affects their numeracy.

̽��ֱ��researchers also measured general cognitive skills, beyond executive functions alone. Here, they found that both boys and girls from wealthier backgrounds in the UK tend to have better general cognitive skills than those from less-affluent families, whereas in China and Hong Kong, there was no relationship to socio-economic status.

̽��ֱ��data from Shandong also confirmed that computer usage had no effect on the acquisition of executive functions.

̽��ֱ��results strongly suggest that cultural distinctions have shaped a gulf between the thinking skills of British and Asian children, with consequences for their relative attainment. More research is needed to establish what these are, but the nature of the school curriculum, teaching styles, parental expectations, or social attitudes to education, may be some of the factors involved.

In addition, the close link between socio-economic background and thinking skills for British boys in particular suggests that understanding more about these cultural drivers may help to narrow the attainment gap within the UK. “A clearer picture of why differences exist in the development of executive functions between children in Britain and Hong Kong would potentially help to inform interventions to reduce that gap,” Hughes said.

Both studies are published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

A comparison of children in Hong Kong, mainland China and the UK has found that British boys’ development of key thinking skills, known as ‘executive functions’, is unusually reliant on their socio-economic status.

Pretty much any test pupils do at school requires executive functions, so if we want to reduce the achievement gap between children from different backgrounds, it’s important that we understand the mechanisms behind that relationship.

Michelle Ellefson

Robin Stott

Five lads walk home from school through Myton Fields, Warwick

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Opinion: Depression - men far more at risk than women in deprived areas

Anonymous — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 10:10:38 +0000

Depression is a major cause of disability around the world, and if left untreated, can lead to substance abuse, anxiety and suicide.

Major depressive disorder is a particular form of the condition which affects many people, potentially causing loss of pleasure in activities that once used to bring joy. It can also lead to feelings of worthlessness, imbalances such as oversleeping or insomnia, and trigger thoughts of suicide. This is the condition we examined during our new study, which showed that living in a deprived area can lead to major depressive disorder in men, but not in women.

Before explaining these findings, it is important to provide some further background on this condition. There are certain factors which can place you at increased risk for major depression. Being diagnosed with a serious chronic ailment, such as diabetes or cancer, now or in the past, can increase your risk for it. As can experiences of trauma, such as physical or sexual abuse, or being raised in a dysfunctional family in which there was a high degree of marital discord.

These, however, are all individual factors – or personal circumstances – which can negatively affect your mental health. And most of the research on depression has indeed focused on such personal factors. But there are characteristics beyond the level of the individual – such as attributes of the communities in which we live – that can also have a profound effect on our mental well-being.

Previous studies have shown that living in communities characterised as deprived can lead residents of those areas to rate their health as suboptimal and experience early death. Through our study, we wanted to know if living in a deprived area can also influence the mental health of men and women – even after accounting for personal circumstances. That is, even after you take people’s socioeconomic status into account (in our study’s case, education and social class), does a person’s residential environment still affect their mental health?

̽��ֱ��findings

To answer this question, we used data from one of Britain’s longest-running studies on health, chronic diseases, and the way people live their lives: EPIC-Norfolk. This study was based on over 20,000 people who filled out detailed questionnaires on their mental health and medical history.

Respondents’ postal codes were linked to the census to determine whether they lived in deprived communities. Five years after deprivation levels were measured, participants filled out a psychosocial questionnaire to determine whether they suffered from major depressive disorder. Using statistical techniques, the association between area deprivation and depression was examined while accounting for medical history, education, social class, and other important factors.

Our study showed that living in a deprived area does affect mental health – at least in men. In fact, we found that men living in the most deprived areas were 51% more likely to experience depression than those living in areas that were not deprived. Interestingly, the results did not reach statistical significance in women.

Loss of purpose. Shutterstock

Our study did not set out to determine why this might be the case – and further research is now needed to do this. Nevertheless, it is possible that many men in the UK and other parts of the world still feel a primary responsibility to provide for and support their families.

A recent study investigating depression risks for men and women indicated that men are more affected by “failures at key instrumental tasks, such as expected work achievements and failures to provide adequately for the family”.

Research shows that men seem to be more sensitive to certain stressors in their environment compared to women, such as those related to work and finances. Women’s depression levels, on the other hand, are more influenced by stressors stemming from relationships and the social networks they are embedded in. Factors such as low parental warmth and low marital satisfaction, for example, can really affect women’s mental health.

A great many factors may be behind this, but in the UK, men are three times more likely to die by suicide than women and so root causes as to why men are struggling should be investigated.

While women are at a lower risk of depression than men in deprived areas, other research shows that they are more likely to experience anxiety. Again, further work is needed on the effect of the residential environment on mental health from a gender perspective.

High numbers of people are living in deprivation around the world and depression is a leading cause of disability on a global scale. Knowing how men and women are affected by the hardship of living in deprivation can help focus mental health treatment, and this is a valuable step forward.

This article is republished from ̽��ֱ��Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Deprivation affects men and women differently, writes Olivia Remes, PhD candidate at the Cambridge Institute of Public Health, with men more likely to experience depression.

Andrik Langfield

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Tracking inequality in India: the story of a pioneer

amb206 — Tue, 04 Jul 2017 13:00:07 +0000

̽��ֱ��widening gap between India’s rich and poor is captured by the National Sample Survey (NSS), an organisation founded in 1950, which gathers data from roughly 14,000 Indian villages and localities to provide a snapshot of how the population at large is faring. ̽��ֱ��NSS and its pioneering role in the measurement of poverty and inequality are some of the important subjects addressed by a conference that starts tomorrow (5 July 2017) in Cambridge to explore how different modern societies have measured social and economic disparity.

Since Indian Independence in 1947, the NSS has conducted more than 70 rounds of surveys, providing much-needed data about household consumption, social inequality, educational attainment and healthcare outcomes. NSS data serves as a backbone to Indian economic planning, public welfare provision and academic research.

̽��ֱ��story behind the NSS goes back to 1913, when a brilliant young man called Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis arrived at King’s College, Cambridge, to study mathematics.

It is said that Mahalanobis had intended to become a student in London but applied to King’s after visiting its world-famous chapel and missing the last train back to the capital. He graduated with a BA in natural science, receiving top marks in his physics final exam.

During his time at Cambridge, he interacted with another outstanding Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan. Influenced by the British journal Biometrika, Mahalanobis began experimenting with new statistical methods for studying and measuring large-scale phenomena – occurrences so widespread and diverse by nature that they are difficult to gauge.

A man of diverse scientific interests, Mahalanobis combined statistics with other emerging disciplines, including anthropology, physics and economics, to develop novel approaches for estimating population distribution, crop yields and household consumption.

Mahalanobis is known for his pioneering work in descriptive statistics – and his name is remembered by the ‘Mahalanobis distance’, a measurement used in studies of population. For many years he taught at Presidency College (Kolkata) where, in 1931, he was responsible for founding the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI).

Today the ISI employs a staff of more than 1,000 people and is a leading international centre for research in applied mathematics, data science and computing.

With funding from the Philomathia Foundation, Dr Poornima Paidipaty (Faculty of History) has embarked on a study focusing on Mahalanobis’s most important contribution at the ISI: his visionary work on the development of large-scale surveys of India’s rural population in response to the country’s drive to realign itself as an industrial force with global reach.

Her research is part of a much larger project on ‘Historicising the Measurement of Inequality’, which is directed by Dr Pedro Ramos-Pinto and examines global histories of quantifying and framing socio-economic disparity.

Starting in the late 1930s, the ISI undertook a series of pioneering pilot surveys to gauge Indian household incomes at a time of huge social and historical upheaval. Sampling offered Indian scientists new tools for generating data on phenomena that had never been comprehensively or accurately measured before. In its early years as a research and training centre, the ISI used sampling to study everything from changing patterns in tea consumption to estimating crop acreage.

This research became more urgent after Independence, when government planners needed more reliable economic data to frame programmes aimed at rapid industrialisation, poverty alleviation and development. Lacking a strong household income tax regime, Indian bureaucrats lacked the fine-grained statistical information used by economists in developed countries to accurately estimate GDP.

Mahalanobis and his colleagues at the ISI offered a unique solution to these problems and designed a pioneering large scale sampling exercise to estimate the size, composition and condition of the Indian economy. As an approach to measurement, it was an original (and at the time, highly risky) endeavour. Many doubted that random sampling could accurately represent the totality of Indian social and economic life.

In 1950, Mahalanobis launched the National Sample Survey (NSS) to undertake the ambitious task of providing a comprehensive picture of India’s domestic economy. In first rounds of research, 1833 villages and residential areas were surveyed. This limited sample was used to represent the nation as a whole, which totalled roughly 360 million people at the time.

During this early period, critics complained that urban areas were over-represented and that surveyors were unfamiliar with the struggles and transformations facing remote regions and rural villages. It took many years for Mahalanobis and colleagues to design a survey that would capture, with an acceptable level of accuracy, the data that the government sought.

Due in part to his widespread academic interests, and his interactions with intellectuals from fields other than mathematics, Mahalanobis’s work incorporated cutting edge research in the social and computational sciences of the postwar era. He collaborated with top economists and mathematicians from around the world, and brought leading scientists to Kolkata for extended periods of time.

Ronald Fisher, JBS Haldane, Norbert Wiener, Andrey Kolmogorov, Jerzy Neyman, Joan Robinson and Simon Kuznets were among the many researchers sponsored by the ISI to collaborate on the Institute’s teaching and ongoing survey efforts in the 1950s and 1960s.

During its first decade, NSS researchers had to address numerous and complicated issues. What size and distribution of survey sites would best represent the nation in its entirety? How should surveyors account for India’s significant informal sector and for labour that was paid in kind, rather than cash?

Measuring national productivity required that researchers account for all productive labour – not just monetised transactions. Similarly, how should surveyors include women’s labour? Survey teams had to build rapport with their subjects, and in many cases, even teach them how to estimate monthly consumption and expenditure. ̽��ֱ��accuracy of data relied on social ties and mutual education – not just rote completion of questionnaires.

Over time, the NSS not only became a valued and relied upon institution, it influenced researchers and policymakers around the globe. Chinese officials sent their statisticians to Kolkata to learn from Mahalanobis’s staff in the 1950s, and the ISI served as a model for the American statistician Gertrude Cox, for the organisation of statistical training in the USA.

With her background in science studies and South Asian history, Paidipaty is well-equipped to understand the technical as well as the social relationships that allowed Indian planners and scientists to define and steer the national economy. Her research draws on the extensive archives of the ISI, which offer unique insights as to how Indian household life was measured in the early decades after Independence and Partition, and how policymakers framed and understand shifting standards of living.

Paidipaty’s work demonstrates that sampling, as a technique of economic measurement, was intimately tied to mid-century economic planning. Under Nehru’s leadership, the Indian state focused its developmental efforts on rapid industrialisation and growth, but achieving these objectives required new tools for defining and measuring the national economy. What were the different, discreet parts of an economy and how did they relate to one another?

Pinning down such abstractions, and offering concrete, tangible data, was indispensible to the work of managing India’s planned economy. ̽��ֱ��early history of sampling roughly overlapped with early experiments in economic planning. Mahalanobis was a member of India’s Planning Commission from 1953 until 1967, and directed the nation’s Second Five Year Plan.

In 2014, India’s government dissolved the Planning Commission, arguing that pro-growth policies ought to be achieved through unfettered markets rather than planned policy interventions. Yet, even without a formal planning apparatus, the significance of large-scale sampling has only grown over the last 70 years.

Since the 1980s, economists around the world, including those at the World Bank and the IMF, have embraced and underscored the importance household sampling. Not only do they provide large-scale aggregative statistics, they are a crucial source of fine-grained and qualitatively rich data.

̽��ֱ��NSS has been an on-going subject of debate amongst economists, but is also a crucial source of information. Angus Deaton, the recipient of the 2015 Nobel prize in economics, in some of his most influential work used NSS data to help the Indian government recalibrate how it defined and measured poverty. Within the current Indian context, in which economic growth and rising inequality are once again at the centre of public debate, it has become all the more important to understand the history of data, how it is produced and what numbers really represent.

As a nation, India is undergoing profound transformation, but rapid growth has come hand in hand with rising inequality as well as growing disparity between rural and urban areas. NSS data remains one of the best resources for understanding and tracking these changes. As more of this information circulates in the public domain, it becomes all the more crucial to appreciate how such data is produced. Paidipaty’s work on the history of the NSS offers a fascinating glimpse into one of the most significant and early mid-century precursors to contemporary developments in big data.

'Measuring Matters: Histories of Assessing Inequality' takes place from 5 to 7 July 2017 at the Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��conference is sponsored by Cambridge's Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).

India’s booming business centres and gleaming shopping malls mask a grimmer reality. While one section of the population gets richer, another section gets poorer. In the countryside, farmers and others ‘left behind’ by the economic surge find themselves in increasingly desperate circumstances. In many cases their plight, exacerbated by crippling debt, has led to suicide.

Within the current Indian context, in which economic growth and rising inequality are once again at the centre of public debate, it has become all the more important to understand the history of data, how it is produced and what numbers really represent.

Trócaire/Justin Kernoghan

Women working in the rice paddy fields in Odisha, one of the the poorest regions of India

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Study finds little change in the IMF’s policy advice, despite rhetoric of reform

fpjl2 — Tue, 24 May 2016 07:43:18 +0000

A new study, the largest of its kind, has systematically examined International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies over the past three decades. It found that – despite claims to have reformed their practices following the global financial crisis – the IMF has in fact ramped up the number of conditions imposed on borrower nations to pre-crisis levels.

̽��ֱ��crisis revived a flagging IMF in 2009, and the organisation has since approved some of its largest loans to countries in economic trouble. At the same time, IMF rhetoric changed dramatically. ̽��ֱ��‘structural adjustment programs’ of austerity and privatisation were seemingly replaced with talk of the perils of inequality and the importance of social protection.

Researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Sociology collected archival material on the IMF’s lending operations and identified all policy conditions in loan agreements between 1985 and 2014 – extracting 55,465 conditions across 131 countries in total.

They found that structural adjustment conditions increased by 61% between 2008 and 2014, and reached a level similar to the pre-crisis period.

̽��ֱ��authors of the study, which used newly-available data and is published today in the Review of International Political Economy, say their findings show that the IMF has surreptitiously returned to the practices it claims it has abandoned: encroaching on the policy space of elected governments by enforcing free market reforms as conditions of lending. This is despite the IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde rejecting concerns over the return of structural adjustment: “We do not do that anymore”*.

“ ̽��ֱ��IMF has publicly acknowledged their objectives to include creating breathing space for borrowing countries, and economic stability combined with social protection,” said lead author Alexander Kentikelenis. “Yet, we show the IMF has in fact increased its push for market-oriented reforms in recent years – reforms that can be detrimental to vital public services in borrowing countries.”

Although the IMF claims its programs can “create policy space” for governments, structural adjustment conditions can reduce this space as they are often aimed at an economy’s underlying structure: privatising state-owned enterprises and deregulating labour markets, for example.

“Our research suggests that structural adjustment is not a policy fad of the past,” said co-author Thomas Stubbs. “ ̽��ֱ��emphatic return of structural conditionality in recent years calls into question the IMF’s ‘we don’t do that anymore’ rhetoric. These reforms at the IMF are basically just hot air.”

Many of these conditions continue to intrude on policy areas such as the labour market, despite claims to the contrary. Post-crisis, examples have included:

̽��ֱ��elimination of 4,000 civil service positions in Moldova in 2010.
A 15% cut in pensions and raising of the retirement age in Romania, re-introduced as a ‘binding’ condition after it was struck down by the country’s constitutional court in 2010.
Extensive labour market liberalisation in Greece, including: the precedence of firm-level over sector-wide pay agreements to reduce the power of collective bargaining; the reduction of minimum wages and employee dismissal costs.
An increased retirement age in Portugal in 2012, followed by a realignment of public sector worker rights to “private sector rules”, including job termination.

In recent years, the IMF emphasised its attention to poverty reduction and social protection, with increasing use of conditions that specify minimum expenditures on health, education and other social policies.

̽��ֱ��researchers found that inclusion of social spending conditions had indeed jumped since 2012, mostly applicable to sub-Saharan African countries. However, after detailed analysis, the authors found that nearly half such conditions were not implemented. Yet those African nations with the weakest adherence to social spending conditions still consistently met, and often far-exceeded, the IMF’s fiscal deficit targets.

“ ̽��ֱ��IMF’s well-advertised ‘pro-poor’ measures are only superficially incorporated into programme design, and are, at best, of secondary importance to stringent macroeconomic targets,” said co-author Lawrence King.

Added Kentikelenis: “We have shown that the IMF has been particularly adept at introducing layers of ceremonial pretences of reform designed to obscure the actual content of its adjustment programmes. These gaps between rhetoric and practice in the IMF’s lending activities reveal an escalating commitment to hypocrisy.”

Researchers describe IMF as having an “escalating commitment to hypocrisy”, as study reveals that strict lending conditions have returned to pre-crisis levels, while ‘pro-poor’ targets frequently go unmet.

These gaps between rhetoric and practice in the IMF’s lending activities reveal an escalating commitment to hypocrisy

Alexander Kentikelenis

Mikhail Klimentyev

Russian President Medvedev meets with Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of International Monetary Fund

Reference

* “We provide lending, and, by the way, structural adjustments? That was before my time. I have no idea what it is. We do not do that anymore. No, seriously, you have to realize that we have changed the way in which we offer our financial support.” - Christine Lagarde, International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC) Press Briefing, Washington, D.C, April 12, 2014

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Opinion: Obesity: stop accusing the poor of making bad choices

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 12:58:24 +0000

Last month, the UK health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, called childhood obesity “a national emergency”, but the government has once again delayed publishing its strategy aimed at combating it.

Obesity is much more common in people with less money and education and this socioeconomic gap is getting larger. An unhealthy diet is a leading risk factor for weight gain and chronic disease and there are marked socioeconomic differences in the types of food consumed.

Dietary inequalities of a different sort were also a concern 80 years ago. In 1936, John Boyd Orr, a Scottish doctor, published Food, Health and Income, which systematically described British eating habits in a way that was unprecedented and critically important both for nutrition science and public health.

Britain in the 1930s was rife with diseases related to malnutrition, particularly among the poor. Studies conducted in impoverished areas of Durham and London found rickets in as many as 80% of children, and inequalities in nutrition manifested themselves in height differences of up to five inches (about 13cm) between the lower and higher socioeconomic classes of school-age children.

New appreciation for food and health

This was also the dawn of modern nutrition science. Although the health benefit of specific foods had been known for centuries, the chemical constituents in food that supported growth and health – what we now call vitamins – were only being discovered in the 1910s and 20s. These discoveries spurred a new wave of science and medicine aimed at understanding the potential for better nutrition to alleviate disease.

John Boyd Orr. Wikimedia Commons

Boyd Orr’s analysis used this latest understanding of “nutritional adequacy” to assess whether people were consuming enough of the nutrients needed for good health. He also surveyed diets among people according to their income. This revealed striking differences in diet, notably in the foods and nutrients important for growth and health – what Boyd Orr called “protective foods”, such as fresh milk, vegetables, fruit, fresh fish and meat.

These foods were consumed much more by middle- and higher-income households – enough to support good health. But lower-income families (about one third of the population) consumed less-healthy diets, consisting principally of potatoes, bread, sugar, margarine and condensed milk. Even with enough of these foods, people were malnourished and vulnerable to disease.

Poor diet, not poor choices

Unlike much of the discussion of the topic today, Food, Health and Income did not talk about “unhealthy habits” or “poor choices”. On the contrary, Boyd Orr recognised that protective foods were more costly and in many cases out-of-reach of low-income families. He argued for improved policies to better enable healthier diets, especially among the poor. He also realised that progress on food and health could only come from a reappraisal of policies across all of government.

But what does any of this have to do with present day efforts to improve diets and combat obesity? At first glance, the public health problem with food has inverted. While in the past, socioeconomic disadvantage was associated with malnutrition and stunting, today disadvantage is linked to obesity. ̽��ֱ��modern problem appears to be overconsumption. But this superficial analysis misses the bigger point that healthier, protective foods are still less accessible for many.

While the poorest in society today typically receive sufficient calories, they frequently don’t eat enough healthy foods. This isn’t because they lack the knowledge, skills or willingness to make healthy decisions, but because of the influence of our social and economic circumstances in shaping food choices.

Real choice for people on low incomes and living in deprived areas may be limited. For instance, poor neighbourhoods tend to be saturated with takeaways and other shops selling unhealthy foods. While supermarkets provide healthier options, the importance of price may limit poorer people to make healthier choices. Calorie for calorie, healthier foods are three times more costly than less-healthy foods.

These environments are of our own making, through agriculture policy, product formulation, portion sizes, advertising, pricing strategies, taxation, and how our neighbourhoods, workplaces and schools are designed.

Now, as in Boyd Orr’s time, the policies and practices that determine the price, quality and availability of food are often at cross-purposes with health. Yet the arguments and government policies on diet and obesity are largely based on the notion of individual “choices”. These are exemplified in public health campaigns designed to encourage and educate us to choose healthier options. This approach has largely failed, because we have yet to address the unhealthy context in which choices are made.

Getting the bigger picture

There are promising signs of more constructive polices. Last autumn, Public Health England’s sugar reduction strategy provided evidence and recommendations for action to improve food environments. ̽��ֱ��test will be whether the government is prepared to take bold action in the much-delayed obesity strategy. Boyd Orr’s report was also delayed by the government in 1936, but his vision for coordinated food and agriculture policy aligned for the public’s health is as relevant today as it was then.

Pablo Monsivais, Senior ̽��ֱ�� Lecturer, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Pablo Monsivais (Centre for Diet and Activity Research) discusses obesity and the influence of socioeconomic circumstances in shaping food choices.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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